Thus, at Churchill’s insistence, by October 1940 the Commandos had grown to two thousand in strength. Everyone volunteered from regular military formations and had basic military training as a minimum, which was complemented by a rigorous training program that included amphibious landings, long marches, survival in the terrain, and close combat. The training paid off during the first successful raid of the Commandos in March 1941 against the Lofoten Islands. They were a group of islands off the coast of Norway about one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle where several factories processed herring and cod oil into glycerin and vitamin A and B pills for the Wehrmacht’s use.9
Five hundred Commandos, a detachment of Royal Engineers, and a platoon of fifty-two Norwegian soldiers sailed from their base in Scotland in a convoy protected by five destroyers. After a three-day journey in the North Atlantic, they arrived off the coast of the Lofoten Islands in the early morning of March 4. The only resistance they encountered was from the German trawler Krebs, which sailed resolutely against the approaching flotilla and was promptly fired upon and set on fire. The Commandos retrieved a set of spare rotors for a German Enigma coding machine before the ship sank. After the raid, they sent them to Bletchley Park, where they were of great use to the code breakers there. As a civilian coast liner, the Mira, came close, the destroyers fired a warning shot across its bow. Most likely not recognizing the warning, the Norwegian skipper failed to stop and the destroyers fired again. Mira sank, resulting in the loss of seven civilian lives.
Using small craft, the troops landed on Vest Vaago and Ost Vaago, the two islands where the fish-oil processing factories were located. The engineers proceeded to destroy all factories on land as well as the nine-thousand-ton Hamburg, one of the most modern fish-processing factory ships at the time. They blew up storage tanks containing eight hundred thousand gallons of fuel, which set several small merchant ships on fire. While the engineers went about their business, the Commandos rounded up all the Germans in the islands and their Quisling collaborators. From the telegraph station, Lieutenant Richard L. Wills sent a telegram to one A. Hitler of Berlin: “You said in your last speech German troops would meet the British wherever they landed. Where are your troops?” Equally cheeky was a bus ride taken by Captain Simon Frasier, 15th Lord Lovat, and some of his men to a nearby seaplane base, where they captured several German sailors. The commander of the base later complained about the “unwarlike” behavior of the Commandos and undertook to report accordingly to the Führer.
After six hours on the islands, the raiders returned to the ships and headed for England. It had been an entirely successful operation. The only casualty the British suffered was a wounded officer who accidentally shot himself in the leg with the pistol he was carrying in his pocket. In addition to the destruction of the facilities in the islands, the Commandos brought with them 214 German prisoners and over 300 Norwegians who volunteered to join the free Norwegian forces in Great Britain. The German reaction to the raid was quick. SS troops raided the area and burned several houses as a punishment for the defections. They took over one hundred civilians as hostages and interned them in the first Norwegian concentration camp opened near Oslo. The Wehrmacht began fortifying the islands and moved one hundred thousand additional troops in Norway to protect from future incursions.
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The next stage in the maturity of the Commandos was their ability to conduct ground assaults in coordination with the navy and air support. Given the traditional parochial nature of the individual services, the Commandos needed a leader that not only would inspire the troops but also would entice the services to collaborate. Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, a member of the royal family and distinguished navy commander, had the perfect experience and pedigree for the job. At the beginning of October 1941, he was appointed chief of Combined Operations Headquarters and was responsible for coordinating the Commandos’ missions with those of the other services. To strengthen Mountbatten’s stature with the three services, he held simultaneously the ranks of vice admiral of the Royal Navy, lieutenant general of the army, and air marshal of the air force.10
The first coordinated operation came at the end of December 1941 against another target off the Norwegian coast: the islands of Vaagso and Maaloy, which served as an assembly point for German troop convoys headed north around Norway to the fighting front in Finland. It was patterned after the Lofotens raid, except this time the British were certain to encounter significant resistance from the Germans who had installed heavily fortified coastal defense guns in Maaloy and could count on the Luftwaffe’s support from nearby air fields.
The task force left the Commando base of operations in Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland, on Christmas Eve and was in position in front of Maaloy on the morning of December 27, 1941. Starting at 0848 hours, four destroyers and the cruiser HMS Kenya, fitted with six-inch guns, rained fire on the small island of Maaloy, less than five hundred yards by two hundred yards, and took out three of the four coastal guns, ammunition stores, oil tanks, and the German barracks located there. Under cover of fire, 105 Commandos approached the shore aboard landing craft. When they were fifty meters from the beach, the naval bombardment stopped. In a perfectly timed action, Hampden bombers appeared overhead and dropped smoke bombs on the beach to cover the landing and initial advance of the Commandos. Despite German resistance, the Commandos overran Maaloy within twenty minutes.
The fighting on Vaagso was heavier, especially in the village of South Vaagso where fifty German crack troops who happened to be vacationing there for Christmas put up a stiff resistance. For several hours, the Commandos fought house-to-house battles and provided cover for the engineers who were mining and destroying the facilities on the island. During this time, the Kenya destroyed a German battery four miles southeast of Vaasgo after a prolonged exchange of fire during which the Kenya took at least three hits. The destroyers swept the fjords for enemy ships while the British long-range Blenheim and Beaufort fighters strafed nearby airfields and engaged German Messerschmitts that came over to support their troops. The raiding party re-embarked at 1445 hours and the entire task force set sail immediately for Scapa Flow. Over seventy Norwegians took passage back to England. To reduce Nazi reprisals on relatives, each volunteer brought along his entire family. On the trip home to England, in the quarters of the British officers, the men of Vaasgo drank a toast to victory and sang a Norwegian Christmas song.11
The Vaasgo raid was a great success in that it demonstrated the British ability to coordinate naval, air, and ground actions to overcome heavily fortified positions and determined resistance from the enemy. Allied losses were seventy Commandos, including seventeen killed, and eight navy casualties, including two killed. In addition, eleven British planes were lost. The engineers demolished all their assigned objectives, including the power station, coastal defenses, the local radio station, a canning factory, and a lighthouse. German losses included 150 killed and 98 captured. Four German fighter planes were shot down while the destroyers sank nine merchant ships totaling 15,000 tons. Two armed trawlers that had been escorting the merchant ships were also captured and sank but not before being thoroughly searched by naval intelligence officers attached to the task force who were able to retrieve the Enigma cipher machines and codebooks.12
As an additional benefit, the raid provided a great morale boost and propaganda value. Two war photographers accompanied the Commandos taking pictures of the action, which were released upon returning home. Life magazine published several pages of “the merry blazes of Vaasgo” at the end of January 1942 and summarized the operation: “The war would not be won by such raid as the Dec. 27 adventure at Vaasgo, but it will be probably won by the kind of daring and surprise typified by the Commandos…. The Vaasgo raid had the enormous benefit of cheering up the entire British Army with a little action in Europe. It also depressed the German garrisons isolated along the long coast of Europe and forced the Germans to regroup and reinforce their defenses.”13<
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After the successful raid at Vaasgo, the military establishment no longer questioned the value of commando-style actions in harassing the Germans and forcing them to disperse their forces to protect from attacks that could pop up anywhere. Churchill however set his sights higher. Writing to Mountbatten, he requested a major shift in focus for the Combined Operations Headquarters, whose “main object must be the re-invasion of France. You must create the machine which will make it possible for us to beat Hitler on land. You must devise the appurtenances and appliances which will make the invasion possible.”14
In early 1942, Mountbatten set up a training center on the grounds of Achnacarry Castle in Scotland designed to create soldiers equipped with the necessary fighting skills to spearhead the upcoming invasions. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Vaughn, a veteran Commando who had been one of the leaders of the Lofotens raid, headed the center. He set up a twelve-week training program specifically designed to prepare the men who volunteered to join the special operations units for the demands of irregular warfare.
The training emphasized the highest standards of initiative, mental alertness and physical fitness, together with the maximum skill at arms. All trainees were pushed to think for themselves, adjust to unexpected circumstances with sound tactical sense, and devise new courses of action in situations that may be entirely different to those that were anticipated. Mentally, they were trained to maintain an offensive spirit at all times. Physically, all men were expected to maintain the highest state of fitness at all times. To graduate, the recruits had to be able to cover seven miles in one hour and fight immediately upon arrival. After covering nine miles in two hours, or twenty-five miles in eight hours, or thirty-five miles in fourteen hours, they were expected to fight after two hours rest. They learned to climb cliffs, mountains, and difficult slopes. Because the sea was regarded as a natural working ground for the Commandos, they were trained to operate in boats and landing craft.
Other skills developed during the training included the ability to live off the land, a highly tuned night sense, compass use, map reading, route memorization, Morse code, and the use of wireless transmitters or semaphores for communication. Special courses taught demolitions and sabotage techniques, handling high explosives, setting up and using Bangalore torpedoes, and laying all types of booby traps. Fighting tactics emphasized street fighting, occupying and setting up defense perimeters around towns, and overcoming all types of obstacles, such as barbed wire, rivers, and high walls. All recruits learned to drive Allied and enemy motorcycles, cars, trucks, and even tracked vehicles, trains, and motor boats. They received first-aid training, learned how to dress gunshot wounds, and practiced carrying the wounded.15
The first cohort of trainees arrived at Achnacarry in March 1942. By the time its gates closed in 1946, twenty-five thousand Allied soldiers—British, American, French, Canadian, Dutch, Norwegian, etc.—had completed the training successfully and received the much coveted green beret of the Commandos. Among the first non-British troops to receive training were the men of the US Army Rangers First Battalion, which was activated on June 19, 1942, under the command of Major William O. Darby.16 Earlier in the year, the US Army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had sent Colonel Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., to Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters in London to arrange for American troops to take part in British Commando raids against German-occupied Europe. The American soldiers that would participate in the raids would come from a broad cross section of units and return to those same units after the raids were over. This would ensure that, when American forces landed in Europe, they would have some combat-experienced men.
On May 26, 1942, the day on which Truscott received the promotion to brigadier general, he proposed to Marshall to organize an American unit along the lines of British Commandos. The British would train the men and include them in combat operations under their control. After receiving training and combat exposure, as many men as possible would return to their original organizations and other men would take their places. Truscott thus intended the new unit to be more of a school than a conventional fighting organization. It differed from other schools in that combat would be part of its curriculum. Marshall approved Truscott’s proposal right away.
Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was then chief of the Operations Division in the War Department General Staff, told Truscott that if such units were organized, he should name them something other than “Commandos” because that name was so strongly identified with the British. Truscott chose “Rangers,” a name that a number of American units had carried before, during, and after the War of Independence. The new unit was thus designated the First Ranger Battalion. Throughout the month of June 1942, Darby, its commanding officer, selected 26 officers and 452 enlisted men among volunteers that came from the US Army Northern Ireland Forces. On June 28, the battalion moved from Northern Ireland to the Achnacarry training center, where it received Commando training until July 31. On August 1, 1942, six officers and forty-five enlisted men of the Rangers were attached to the Numbers 3 and 4 Commandos and the Canadian 2nd Division for the raid on the French port of Dieppe.
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In the Allied military thinking at the time, the initial target of the invasion of Europe would be a port with sufficient facilities to support the considerable logistic requirements of the landing forces. The Dieppe Raid was intended to test the Germans defenses of such facilities, in addition to rehearsing coordinated action between Allied air power, naval forces, and ground assault teams. According to the plan, an Allied fleet of 237 ships and landing craft left ports from southern England in the evening of August 18, 1942. Troops of Number 3 Commando led by Lieutenant Colonel John Durnford-Slater and Number 4 Commando led by Lieutenant Colonel Lord Lovat formed the advance party of the invasion force. Their mission was to neutralize coastal batteries east and west of Dieppe before they could fire on the ships carrying the main landing force composed of the Canadian 2nd Division.
About an hour before they reached the target, 3 Commando ran into German patrol boats. They suffered significant casualties in the ensuing firefight and were dispersed, with only about half of the Commandos able to land on the designated beach. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Wills, the same one who had sent the telegram to Hitler during the raid in the Lofotens Islands, was shot through the neck. The next ranking officer, Lieutenant Edward Loustalot of the US Rangers, took charge and led the Commandos up a narrow lane behind the beach. He was killed there—the first American soldier of World War II to be killed in Europe.17 The raiding force was reduced to only eighteen men. They were not able to destroy the assigned battery but managed to snipe at the German crews with sufficient precision to prevent them from hitting the approaching vessels.
Things went better for Lord Lovat’s 4 Commando, which included four Rangers: Corporal William R. Brady, Staff Sergeant Kenneth Stemson, Sergeant Alex J. Szima, and Corporal Franklin M. Koons. Upon landing on the beach, the Commandos received an order to storm a seventy-five-foot cliff and knock out two pillboxes on top of it. “It looked like a suicide mission but damned if we didn’t make it,” Corporal Brady said later.18 In the ensuing firefight, Corporal Koons became the first American ground soldier to kill a German in World War II.19 Lovat’s raiders were able to destroy the six-inch gun batteries relatively quickly and without serious casualties. By 0830 hours, they had re-embarked the landing craft and headed back for England. This was the only unit participating in the Dieppe operation that completed their objective.
The main landing force, five thousand infantry, mostly Canadians, and twenty-seven Churchill tanks, landed at four beaches in front of Dieppe. They were decimated by the alerted Germans who made the best of the strong fortifications they had built to protect the port and its adjacent beaches. Political considerations and a desire to avoid French civilian casualties had taken off the table the option to soften these fortifications through aerial or naval bombardment, although bo
th the Royal Air Force and the navy did their best to support the troops stranded in the beaches. At 1100 hours, six hours after the landings had started, the withdrawal from the beaches began and continued for three hours under heavy fire. Casualties from the raid included 3,367 Canadians and 275 British Commandos killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The Royal Navy lost one destroyer and thirty-three landing craft, suffering 550 dead and wounded. The RAF lost 106 aircraft to the Luftwaffe’s 48. The German army casualties were 591.20
The raid was a disaster that has raised controversies ever since. Historians have advanced a number of theories over the years and continue to bring forward new ones to this day to explain it. They range from the possibility that Mountbatten acted without authorization in launching the raid to the hypothesis that the raid was a cover for the true operation led by Ian Fleming in which British military intelligence would steal the Enigma codes from the German naval headquarters in Dieppe.21 What remains undisputed is that the Allied planners learned a number of lessons from the failure at Dieppe, which were factored into the planning of the Normandy invasion on D-Day.22
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, the British point of view prevailed that the best place to open a second front against the Germans was in the Mediterranean. It was a strategy that Churchill defined as a “wide encircling movement in the Mediterranean having for its primary objective the recovery of the command of that vital sea, but also having for its object the exposure of the underbelly of the Axis, especially Italy, to heavy attack.”23 The first step in implementing this strategy was Operation Torch, the American-led invasion of French North Africa. The Rangers, now operating independently of the British Commandos and under full control of the US Army, were among the first units to engage in what was the first in a long string of strikes against German targets for the remainder of the war.
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